Google Patent About Document Scoring Based On A Document’s Traffic

April 26, 2007 – 6:00 pm

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For a period of time I’ve suspected that Google was interested in using data about your website’s traffic in order to help with scoring, and it appears they’re definitely able to do it. A recent patent application (number 20070088693), filed on April 19th., 2007 goes heavily into the nuts and bolts of how such a ranking system would work.

Here’s the Abstract of the patent which was invented by Steve Lawrence:

A system determines an extent to which advertisements are presented or updated within a document, a quality of an advertiser associated with an advertisement provided within the document, whether an advertisement in the document relates to an advertising document that has more than a threshold amount of traffic, and/or an extent to which an advertisement provided within the document generates user traffic to an advertising document related to the advertisement. The system generates a score for the document based, at least in part, on the extent to which advertisements are presented or updated within the document, the quality of the advertiser associated with the advertisement provided within the document, whether the advertisement relates to an advertising document that has more than the threshold amount of traffic, and/or the extent to which the advertisement generates user traffic to the advertising document. The system ranks the document with regard to at least one other document based, at least in part, on the score.

Quite a mouthful. The patent isn’t too clear about what exactly constitutes an advertisement, but you can probably guess. More interesting improvements in Google’s search technology, as always.

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